339 Quotes by Octavia E. Butler

There is no power in having strength and brains, and yet waiting for God to fix things for you or take revenge for you.

I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery.

Praying makes people feel better even when there’s no action they can take,” he said. “I used to think that was all God was good for – to help people like my mother stand what they had to stand.

God is not to be prayed to. Prayers only help the person doing the praying, and then, only if they strengthen and focus that persons resolve.

It’s too easy to follow bad but attractive leaders, embrace pleasurable but destructive habits, ignore looming disaster because maybe it won’t happen after all – or maybe it will only happen to other people. That kind of thinking is part of what it means to be adolescent.

He wasn’t a monster at all. Just an ordinary man who sometimes did the monstrous things his society said were legal and proper.

It seems inevitable that people who can’t read are going to lean more toward judging candidates on the way they look and sound than on what they claim they stand for. Even people who can read and are educated are apt to pay more attention to good looks and seductive lies than they should. And no doubt the new picture ballots on the nets will give Jarret an even greater advantage.

That’s all anybody can do right now. Live. Hold out. Survive. I don’t know whether good times are coming back again. But I know that won’t matter if we don’t survive these times.

A victim of God may, Through learning adaption, Become a partner of God, A victim of God may, Through forethought and planning, Become a shaper of God. Or a victim of God may, Through shortsightedness and fear, Remain God’s victim, God’s plaything, God’s prey.